Art in Our Universities

The Immediate and Obvious Need for the Study of It in American Colleges

JOHN JAY CHAPMAN

THERE has recently been a very real and widespread awakening fn America as to the meaning of the fine-arts, and the leaders of this little renaissance are turning to our Universities for assistance and protection. They are greatly surprised at receiving the cold shoulder from our University magnates. The Deans and Presidents want to know how many art students the promoters will agree to supply, what prospects there is that art will, in the end, fill the stomachs of its devotees, what right they, the officials, have to divert money which might go to the really useful schools of Medicine, Forestry and Law, and give it to a vaporous idea, the idea of art. And very expensive is the idea. It costs millions, they say, and is, perhaps, a fad that will blow over and leave no art after all, but only the memory of a fruitless experiment.

Our serious promoters of art are, as it seems to me, a little irrational in that they are annoyed at the Deans and College Presidents who can't see the point of an Art School at a University. Did these enthusiasts expect the Deans to be suddenly inspired by Orpheus and to dance Bacchic dances on the college green? The value of a University Art School will only be apparent to a man who by nature is himself thrilled by some form of art, or else to a man who, through long pondering on some of the most abstract ideas of which the mind is capable, has come to see that the plastic arts (though they mean nothing to him, personally,) are among the most important elements in human life. It is both base and futile for artistic persons to try to convince our college presidents that the fine arts are "useful" in the sense which is required by the curriculum of an American University.

What Is a University For?

THE matter of Art Schools in our Universities is chiefly important because it involves a fundamental enquiry, "What is a University for?" The subject has never been broached before in America and the art issue is an entering wedge. The issue is perhaps a sign that a new era is dawning in the history of our higher education. The difficulty is that the question arises in a field which to the average American mind has been almost a blank. Art to the American has been a superfluity, a curiosity, a myth. He is bothered enough already with the problems of self-support, of government, of beneficence; and now he is asked to add to his worries a thing about whose very existence he has his doubts.

For what, then, does a University exist? In Europe the Universities were started in an epoch when art and architecture were a part of the popular life, a part of the church,—a drug on the market. Roman law was the first of the lost arts which the Universities strove to rediscover, and the literatures of Greece and Rome were their next great quarry. Indeed, these special humanities bore to the Middle Ages much the relation which the plastic arts bear to America to-day. They were the glittering magic records of a past era, lost languages of highly cultivated peoples; and the effort to recover them is what educated modern Europe and gave us modern poetry, history, philosophy and most of the things that make up the wistfulness and charm of life.

As for our American Universities, they are so various and divergent that one would have to stand on a pivot to get a view of their aims and meanings. One can see that, roughly speaking, there have been two distinct periods in their history. The older ones were founded upon such reminiscences of the Mediaeval system as could be conveniently transported across the Atlantic. Books are portable and scholars can walk, and so the tradition of the classic languages, of mathematics, law, philosophy, theology and the moral sciences were established in America. The stream of culture was thin because the sources were distant. Your American scholar could not use the Bodleian Library, or pick up an early copy of Justinian by walking in the market-place of Bologna. And then, let us remember that there were many other things to do in the American Colonies besides thinking about the humanities.

The mediaeval inheritance of learning, much enfeebled by crossing the sea, held its place, nevertheless, in American colleges down to quite recent times, in fact, down to the commercial era; and then it began to occur to our educators that the colleges must be made into business and professional schools or else nobody would go to them. Engineering, mechanics, practical law, architecture and business efficiency were introduced, without much regard to theory, but because it was a convenient and obvious thing to do. The tendency to make the Universities into schools which should inculcate success, marks this second stage in our university life. This era has been in progress for the last fifty years, with the result that most of the Regents and Directors of our Universities have forgotten that an American University can have any other object except to fit men for what appear to be the needs of an immediate future. If, for instance, the outlook seems to indicate that many roads must be built in Russia during the next ten years, the Trustees of Harvard or Yale will start a School of Roadmaking with enthusiasm. But it is very difficult to get an American University to take a long view of any subject. Commercial questions are solved by short views. To look ten years ahead indicates genius in a business man. But in questions which concern spiritual education, a matter of a hundred years is as a watch in the night; and indeed one can be guided towards their solution only by ideas that are ubiquitous and enduring and in which the question of time does not, so to speak, enter at all.

Colleges Reflect the National Soul

IN America our Universities are the residuary legatees of all the cultivation of Europe. This is what they stand for in the popular mind. They must do many things which in Europe have become government functions. They must take the whole of intellect as their province and regard the spiritual aspirations of every citizen as their business. If you were founding a new one, the thing to do would be to look at the crowd on Fifth Avenue and Forty-second Street and say, "My influence must reach every one of these men." That the old academies do already, to some extent, reach them is obvious. The most ignorant man among them knows that there is such a thing as Greek. Strike Greek from your curriculum, and ten years hence that man will not know that there is such a thing as Greek. The curricula of our Universities are an index to our national soul. I do not believe that anything is more important in American life than our college curricula.

Let us take, from France, an illustration of how the higher education affects the popular life. If you stop for lunch at an Inn in some remote French town you will perhaps be surprised at the refinement and appropriateness of all its appointments. The furniture, the clock, the colors, the harmony and taste apparent in everything make you cry out "What a wonderful people are the French! What natural talent they have for all branches of the fine arts! This Inn is in itself the perfection of an old world hostel. The place is an academy of good taste, and must be educating the taste of the whole province by its very existence!" You next fall into conversation with your host, and it turns out that he was to have been an artist. He attended an art school in his youth, and later he had worked in a studio. He knows every picture in the Louvre, and has every stone of an old Paris by heart.

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But the man had not original talent enough to become a painter; and thus he drifted back to his native village and became an innkeeper. He is now an amateur of the first water, and if any boy of genius should show his head in the province, your host will put him in the way of advancement and of education before he is twelve years old.

These evidences of French talent which have so impressed you are due to governmental protection of the fine arts. The influence of the Beaux Arts and the Academy are at the bottom of them. In France the plastic arts are regarded as a part of education. They rank with Greek, physics, engineering, music, etc.

The French take Apollo seriously. The French know that the only way to nourish and preserve any great talent when it shall appear is to generate such a high average of appreciation for it, and give it such a welcome that it cannot, thereafter, be lost or destroyed. A French boy of promise in sculpture is helped and pushed along at once. This is because everyone in France knows a good thing when he sees it. Young cabman takes off his shiny hat at the name of Gerome,—Degas, or of whoever is the dominant artist of the moment. The cabman does not do this by instinct or natural gift; but the information has sifted down to him that art is important.

All institutions of the higher learning, whether supported by governments or by private persons, exist principally for the sake of spreading the news that there is such a thing as genius. They preserve its works, they house and enshrine the idea of it.

ALL that your Art Schools and studios, all that your sedulous philosophy and cultivation can do, is to blaze the way for the spirit; and to prepare a sort of layette for art. The child will not draw its life from these things; but without them he will die.

We all feel that a New Era is opening upon the world in the wake of the Great War. We feel this confusedly. The single point that is clear is that the spiritual interests of all mankind have been drawn to a single focus, and the center of gravity of many nations has swung to an international point. Whatever is in Europe is in America. We are entering an age of world-unity.

THE spiritual tidal waves that govern the world are hidden, unpredictable, surprising. Nevertheless we are privileged to make guesses about them. There are certain large reasons for surmising that the new age of world-unity may show a revival in the fine arts, and that it is our duty to prepare for them. The world has shown signs of immense tidal influences before now. During the Italian Renaissance there was a cognate movement of great art in China. Just before the Great War a passion for dancing broke out simultaneously in Europe, America, South America,— everywhere at once. Elderly men and women danced themselves to death in cabarets and on street corners. They took lessons in the forenoon, and stood in line for places at improvised parlors and dance-halls. An imprisoned emotion of some sort found vent in a return to peasant life. A primal, artistic craving broke the bonds of a too-sophisticated, too-critical, too-intelligent epoch, and flooded people's bodies with infantile emotion. This was a good preparation for war, and a good omen for a revival of the fine arts. For all the fine arts are born in the stomach, and are fed by a robust emotional nature, from which source their most delicate, most intellectual blossoms draw life.

IF it be true that the dancing craze was the beginning of an art-era, then we may expect a new poetry, a new painting, a new architecture. These are more slow and difficult matters than the turkey trot or the carmagnole. Your business man of sixty, however he may suddenly feel thrilled by a sunset, cannot soothe his feelings by painting it in water-colors. He cannot dash off his heroic sentiment in the form of a nude figure of Apollo, or play you a nocturne in b flat that occurred to him as he left the Club. The manna may be about to fall; yet we shall require preparation,—baskets, early rising, and assiduity in order to catch it. The virgins must have their lamps filled, and be on the watch.

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THERE are special reasons for thinking that America may soon be touched by an artistic impulse. Among the two million of our boys who have been in the war there were few who did not pass through a profound religious experience. The survivors speak of such things with wonderful simplicity. A sailor boy will say to you on the train "After all, nothing counts except to be at one with the great Central Power of the Universe." They speak like mystics and young prophets; and they fought like inspired beings. This exaltation is impersonal and belongs to the epoch. That some of these young men are artists by nature is certain; and that all of them have been dipped in Europe at a moment when their souls were sensitive to every kind of beauty cannot be doubted. They have received new senses. This wafture from the old world will pass into our life mysteriously, and will make art easier for us. Art will no longer be a mere name, but a craving. Another thought crosses my mind, and concerns not only our returning soldiers but all the youth of our country, whose hearts followed the war. It would seem to me that nothing except some form of pure intellectual activity can satisfy a mind that has lived through this war in its youth. The note that was sounded in such a mind can be sustained only through a life given to religion, beneficence, letters, or the fine arts; and it is reasonable to think that the next generation will show a revival of all these deeper spiritual interests in America.